Problem Solvers I Hate Meetings. This Expert Showed Me Why I'm Part of the Problem
Feb 9, 2026
Rebecca Hinds, organizational behavior expert who leads the Work AI Institute at Glean and author of Your Best Meeting Ever, explains why most meetings waste time. She outlines a clear test to decide if a meeting belongs on your calendar. She talks about treating meetings like products, designing communication systems to cut meetings, and how AI and leadership norms will reshape collaboration.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Dropbox 'Delete And Rebuild' Experiment
- Rebecca first became enthralled by meetings studying Dropbox's 'Our Meeting Get In' intervention.
- The IT team deleted recurring meetings so employees had to rebuild them from scratch, revealing real meeting needs.
Visibility Bias Fuels Excess Meetings
- Meetings are highly visible parts of collaboration and create a bias equating presence with productivity.
- That visibility bias drives excessive, often unnecessary meetings that clutter calendars and signal busyness.
More Tools Can Mean More Meetings
- More digital tools after the pandemic increased meeting time because people lacked clarity on where work should happen.
- Without norms, added tools push teams to default back into visible meetings rather than asynchronous work.
